Post Tagged with: "government"

Last week, a photo album began circulating on social media sites which showed a young Finnish mother-to-be receiving her government-funded maternity box.

The photos generated a huge amount of interest in the Finnish system – but other than showing us the contents of said box, didn’t do justice to quite what an awesome initiative it is. So I’ve been doing a bit of digging myself…

As a blogger, I’ve tended to stray away from politics so far. I’m not especially knowledge about matters of law or politics, and when it comes to the “rights” of fathers in situations like divorce, I don’t pretend to have a solution or an especially strong opinion either way…

However, what I DO firmly believe is that children benefit from having both parents present in their lives – at least assuming both parents are sensible human beings, of course. But defining whether any parents is “fit” to have children is a different issue entirely, so I won’t stray there for now.

As with most people nowadays, I know plenty of people who are either the product of parents who are no longer together, or divorced parents themselves. Luckily, most of them seem to either have coped fine with the childhood experience or are parents who seem to be dealing with the situation reasonably maturely.

For those that haven’t been following the news, new legislation came in to force yesterday (in the UK) which changes the way parents can use maternity/paternity leave. The new rules, devised by the last Government and held up by the current one, mean that fathers can now share a portion of the mother’s maternity leave entitlement. Here’s the rules in a nutshell: